Khorton

Not nec­es­sar­ily, be­cause peo­ple can be­lieve that mul­ti­ple kinds of work are sig­nifi­cant. I will never be in the mil­i­tary, but I be­lieve there are Gen­er­als out there whose de­ci­sions are life-and-death for a lot of peo­ple. I could pre­sum­ably be­lieve the same about AI safety.

I was go­ing to raise some similar ob­jec­tions, but you did it bet­ter. :) The only ex­tra point I would raise is that my worst fear with pro­ject isn’t it be­ing a waste of re­sources—my worst fear would be that it leads to sig­nifi­cantly worse group-think as the “best and bright­est” ab­sorb the “right an­swers” from one or two teach­ers.

“Given that there is no use­ful anal­y­sis which could be mean­ingful, I need to make an ar­bi­trary, in­stinc­tive de­ci­sion.”

I agree that analysing which char­i­ties best match your goals is difficult, but I’m sur­prised that you don’t think there’s any use­ful anal­y­sis out there—es­pe­cially since you’re ob­vi­ously in­volved with EA! Can you ex­plain that to me?

-The per­son who or­ga­nizes the com­pe­ti­tion doesn’t have the skills to run it prop­erly (eg the prize is awarded very late or not at all).

Waste of re­sources com­pared to coun­ter­fac­tual:

-Thou­sands of dis­ser­ta­tions could be en­tered. Even if you spent 5 min­utes eval­u­at­ing each, that’s 100+ hours of your time. Depend­ing on what your time is worth, if you spent the time work­ing in­stead of eval­u­at­ing dis­ser­ta­tions, you could po­ten­tially save a tod­dler’s life from malaria.

-It’s un­likely that an­nounc­ing a prize now will im­pact cur­rent PhD stu­dents, who prob­a­bly chose their topic years ago (al­though it could po­ten­tially in­fluence new stu­dents).

-Are we sure that prizes in­fluence dis­ser­ta­tions? Is there any ev­i­dence base for this?

Tak­ing one pro­gram­ming class to test your ap­ti­tude (or spend­ing the equiv­a­lent time learn­ing on­line) might also be worth­while. If your one pro­gram­ming class goes well, you might de­cide that pro­gram­ming would be a good back-up op­tion in case you don’t end up work­ing at MIRI/​GPI/​CEA/​wher­ever else you re­ally want to work.

I think peo­ple don’t stress enough how im­por­tant it is to be able to pay your stu­dent loan and keep a roof over your head af­ter your grad­u­a­tion. Learn­ing a pro­gram­ming lan­guage and, if that goes well, in­tern­ing or work­ing part time or tak­ing a sum­mer job work­ing in that lan­guage, is an ex­cel­lent way to keep your­self out of poverty.

I’m not sure I can an­swer from an EA per­spec­tive, but I’ll try to per­son­ally re­flect on the most use­ful uni­ver­sity courses I’ve taken:

-I took two post­grad­u­ate re­search meth­ods courses (Quan­ti­ta­tive Re­search Meth­ods and Eval­u­at­ing Public Policy). I am now much bet­ter at eval­u­at­ing the claims made in so­cial sci­ences pa­pers, which I’m re­ally happy about.

-So­ciol­ogy /​ Psy­chol­ogy courses have in­fluenced some of my core be­liefs (na­ture vs nur­ture; re­wards vs pun­ish­ment; etc), so in a sense I use this knowl­edge on a daily ba­sis.

-Drama classes can be great for de­vel­op­ing your com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills, as well as your abil­ity to put your­self in some­one else’s shoes.

-I trained as a teacher, and my class­room man­age­ment class was sur­pris­ingly trans­fer­able to an office set­ting. It re­ally helped me think about how I can in­fluence other peo­ple’s be­havi­our by choos­ing a meet­ing’s en­vi­ron­ment and agenda and through my own ver­bal and non­ver­bal com­mu­ni­ca­tion.

Slight down­vote be­cause I don’t think this is what EAs should fo­cus on. The claim that we could make aca­demic knowl­edge 50% sim­pler isn’t well-ev­i­denced in the ar­ti­cle, and the area seems quite in­tractable for rea­sons ex­plained in the ar­ti­cle.

I don’t think it makes sense to donate to an “effec­tive char­ity” in the typ­i­cal sense when it comes to obe­sity be­cause your ex­ter­nal­ity is only af­fect­ing tax­pay­ers in your own health­care sys­tem.

Given that the table listed the cost of obe­sity as af­fect­ing so­cial­ized medicine, you would pre­sum­ably donate to some­thing lo­cal and med­i­cal, like a hos­pi­tal. You could also po­ten­tially donate to (eg di­a­betes) re­search or a char­ity that makes healthy eat­ing eas­ier in your area.